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In Seattle, Protests Over Racial Equity Turn to Land Ownership

To help resist gentrification, the city’s Africatown Land Trust is leading a campaign to transfer underutilized property to the Black community. 

Crowds outside Ezell’s Chicken in Seattle’s Central District neighborhood listen to march organizers explain gentrification issues in this historically black neighborhood during the Juneteenth Freedom March and Celebration on June 19. 

Crowds outside Ezell’s Chicken in Seattle’s Central District neighborhood listen to march organizers explain gentrification issues in this historically black neighborhood during the Juneteenth Freedom March and Celebration on June 19. 

Photographer: Karen Ducey/Getty Images North America
Gregory Scruggs

On June 5, well over 1,000 protesters (and at least two handsome horses), crowded onto the parking lot at 23rd and Jackson Streets in Seattle for a 1960s-style teach-in, where neighborhood residents unspooled the history of the city’s Central District. Long known as the heart of Seattle’s Black community, the neighborhood’s identity was forged back in the 19th century, when a Black businessman named William Grose opened a restaurant, hotel and barbershop in frontier-era Seattle and eventually settled the first African-American enclave in the Pacific Northwest. 

Today’s Central District activists are looking to continue Grose’s legacy as the city’s first Black landowner, via a community land trust — a nonprofit entity that collectively owns and holds property for community uses like housing. “We need a new normal rooted in equity,” said K. Wyking Garrett, president and CEO of the Africatown Community Land Trust. “And equity means ownership.”